


перигелий

by dissembler



Series: celestial bodies [1]
Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: F/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 05:18:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17912732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dissembler/pseuds/dissembler
Summary: Alina barely breathes. Seconds feel like hours. Once. Twice. Three times. The revellers finally give up.An early Shadow and Bone slight divergence, in which Alina Starkov acts selfishly and has the Darkling while she has the chance.





	перигелий

**Author's Note:**

> перигелий is perihelion in Russian, the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid or comet that is nearest to the sun.
> 
> The dub-con warning is there because the Darkling obviously has reasons for allowing this to play out the way it does but since we're equal opportunity in our dub-con the argument can also be made that Alina leverages what she feels through their connection in ways that are not all that wholesome. Consent is not discussed -- lack of intent is alluded to but both characters do want to be doing what they're doing.

  
I had a taste for you once.  
LEIGH BARDUGO

 

  
The door rattles once, twice, three times, pushing her against him as he braces his shoulder against it, his hand on her thigh trapped between them. A heated point of contact, her world closed in on that. Black silk, white skin, and silence between them.

Alina barely breathes. Seconds feel like hours. Once. Twice. Three times. The revellers finally give up.

“I should go.”

Alina clasps a hand over his on her thigh, leans against his wrist where his other hand is still braced against the door next to her head. The panicky, young, _ozkazat’sya_ part of her wants her to nod, to let him go. The Grisha wants to pull him closer.

“They are waiting, Alina,” he says and she has never heard him breathless. She has never so much as imagined it was possible but there’s a flush high on his cheeks and for all that she can feel the sharp annoyance through the bond she can feel that he isn’t moving, mentally or physically, away. And that’s power, isn’t it, of a sort?

But Ivan, the stag, the amplifier, to be useful. He should go and she should be letting him but none of this has been anything like what should have happened. He’s thrown out all her shoulds and expecteds. Alina tightens her grip, presses his hand harder, loses a little breath when in return he digs his nails into her skin.

“Don’t, please—“ it’s out of her before she realises and it’s her nature to blush, to want to apologise. A silly girl keeping him from important things. Her face burns, she bites her lip, but she doesn’t let her hand fall.

Alina looks up at him, dazed and hot and waiting for him to say something, to do something, even if it’s just to break her hold on him — she knows it would be easy for him, she’s not strong, no matter what Botkin tries to teach her — or to tell her to let go, to stop wasting his time. Their time. The stag is for her as much as it’s for him.

His other hand has dropped to rest on her shoulder, close to the juncture of her throat, thumb tracking over the skin under her jaw. It makes her breathing stutter, all of her wrapped up in a thudding tension. His thumb moves in time with her heartbeats, she wonders if that’s deliberate, if her blood is as loud to him as it is to her.

It’s so dark in this room, no candles, just the moonlight through a window. Darkness used to mean anonymity, but darkness has a name here in Os Alta, a title. This darkness feels like it could be his doing, hiding what might happen here from the light.

Her gaze drops from his. _What might happen_. She had thought that all her firsts would be Mal’s, or rather she had hoped they would be and accepted that if they were not then they would be with some _otkazat’sya_ boy: a soldier, or if the war ended a farmer, maybe another mapmaker. She had never thought a first might be here, in a royal room with this man, a leader of armies.

Two fingers tilt her head up. “You don’t want to be doing this.” He’s mocking her, but he brings his mouth to hers again and she feels him, across their connection, she feels him repeat his own response and she joins him: This is all I want to be doing.

The jolt of their connection has not shocked her as much this time, she rallies faster, she keeps on hand over his but brings the other to his back, clings on. She can feel the heat of him through the fabric, a reassuringly shared fever. Again, it feels like power.

He catches her bottom lip between his teeth and she sucks in a breath, eyes slipping closed. “You keep telling me what I want,” she says.

A laugh catches in his throat. “I do, don’t I? But then I don’t think you do.”

She hums against his mouth in askance and he bites her lip again.

“You don’t know what you want.”

He has had a century, more, of lovers, a century to work out what to do and do it well. His mouth hovers over hers and she needs him to kiss her, his fingertips dig into her thigh and she wants him to never let go. He knows exactly what he’s doing to her and here she is, untested, untrained, barely kissed and never touched and up against him.

Alina rests her head against the door, baring her neck and breaking the kiss. She opens her eyes as he leans back.

“I want,” she says and he looks down at her, mouth a mean curve. “I want you to show me what I want, since you know it so well.”

His cants an eyebrow at the challenge and for a moment she fears, but then he breaks her grip on his hand and attacks the fabric at her waist, untying the sash. He buries his face into the hollow of her neck, teeth at her pulse-point as he undoes the buttons that line her chest.

She gasps when the cool air hits her newly exposed skin and when her _kefta_ is hanging off her shoulders he leans back in, presses flush against her and slides his hands up her back, between the coat and her underclothes. His long fingers are splayed across her spine as he pulls her impossibly closer.

Alina whines when he digs his nails in, brings her own hands up to his face as she cranes up to bring their mouths together, leans into the hunger and need that floods the connection between them when they meet.

His presses his thigh between her legs and she feels it like king up, the realisation of what she wants. What she needs. She loses control of the kiss, her open mouth against his murmuring nonsense as he rocks against her. Once, twice, three times. She drops her hands to his back and clutches, bearing her body down to chase the friction, the sensation, the pressure where she’s wet and has been since his hand found her thigh what feels like hours ago.

That hand on her thigh feels like a missed opportunity and she wants it back. “Please,” she manages to gasp. “Please.”

She feels him laugh against the corner of her mouth but he does as she asks, withdraws his leg and brings a hand to replace it, runs his fingertips over where she’s raw and red and soaking.

“Clever Alina,” he says, his voice taut and low and sharp, desire and that something else that’s faded from anger to a grudge, not aimed at her but aimed internally. He touches her despite himself, he wants to do this to her despite himself. He needs to, aches like she aches to, despite himself. He can’t tear himself away now he’s started.

Alina is almost smiling, gearing up to say something smug and unlike her but so like him, when he slips one long finger into her and it dies on her lips, thrown out in favour of a desperate sigh. She drops her head back again, knocks against the wood harder than she’d anticipated, unable to control her own body. Unable to control her mouth, still whispering words than run together, that sound like _pleasepleaseplease_ and _saints_ and _oh_.

She squints against a sudden growing brightness, her palms glowing unbidden. Her power answering the pull of his amplifying, call and response. Like calls to— he curls his finger inside her and she yelps, loud and unintended and he moves his hand from the small of her back to cover her mouth. His eyes fierce, warning, and like some sort of punishment he adds another finger and presses his thumb against her clit in quick succession. Alina jolts, clenches around him and then at last he makes a sound, a ragged little hitch in his breath that she immediately wants again.

He is still fully clothed and it strikes her that that isn’t part of what she wants, she wants him half-clad like her, _kefta_ opened, she wants to see what’s underneath his as he uses what’s underneath hers.

With unsteady fingers she undoes the clasps the hold his coat together, a line down the centre of his chest, the catch underneath the fabric rather than over it like her buttons. Pinch and release. His breathing gets less steady as her hands descend and then it’s open, and she splays her fingers over his chest, just the thin silk of his undershirt between their scalding skin, between her hand and taut muscle as he suddenly holds himself so very still, pulling his fingers from her to hold her hip.

Alina whines against his palm at the loss, only noticing how obscene the sounds had been when they stop, when all that fills the silence is their breathing, staccato.

“I should go, Alina,” he tells her, voice stretched thin and brittle. “Before.”

She shakes her head. Reaches up to drag his hand from her mouth. “You can’t.”

His eyes concede before he does, gaze flickering to her mouth. “No,” he agrees and he kisses her hard, bruising and violent, and she sobs as his fingers go back, as he slides three into her without preamble, stretching her.

It hurts, a little, but a good hurt. Like the strain that makes things worth it. He presses close, tangles his hand in her hair and tugs once, twice, three times, to make her gasp into his mouth.

Alina pulls his shirt free of his trousers, slides a hand over the bare skin of his chest, dragging feverish heat with her. He pulls her hair again, pulls her head back to bite under her jaw, sucking blood bruises that Genya may have to heal later.

She digs her nails into the skin over his heart, hard enough, she hopes, to mark him as he’s marking her. She thinks almost guiltily of the scar on her palm, which mark means the most: the heat in this or the pain in that?

He smiles against her throat. _You don’t want to be doing this_. She pulls his head up with the hand that isn’t over his heart, fingers curling into his silken hair to guide his face back up to hers so she can kiss him, sharp and needy and needing him to need this as much as she does. Needing to feel that he does, needing that certainty.

Alina isn’t disappointed, he’s aching over their connection, untouched and hating himself for needing that rectified. She feels the shape of the word _human_ , the word _ordinary_. Things he thinks he’s above, things she knows now beyond a doubt that he has held himself above. Again she feels that want. _D_ _espite_.

She pulls her hand back from his chest, emboldened, shifts down to his waistband but his hand leaves her hair quicker, grabs her wrist, pulls her up short.

Between her legs his thumb finds that part of her again and he pulls his fingers out and slides them back inside oncetwicethreetimes, matching the thrusts by pressing down sharp — once — rolling his thumb — twice — and dragging his nail there — three times.

Alina comes with a startled cry, his other hand circling her wrist like a vice, holding her still as every part of her shudders and breaks against him. It hurts, she feels the bones of her wrist grind together as his grip tightens.

His breathing is just as ragged as hers and Alina thinks of how much she’d needed relief, imagines that twofold in him for having brought her release. Need, despite.

She flexes her hand in his grip and his eyes snap to hers. He drops her hand like she’s burnt him and he steps away, leaving her reeling, her support gone, and he looks at her, matches her dazed look with his own before the shutters fall and his posture shifts back to Grisha leader, standing tall: unaffected.

But his coat is open and his shirt untucked and his hair is no longer immaculate, she doesn’t dare to think what a mess hers is. She just looks at him, willing him to give into the need, despite, but he shakes his head and when he steps back into her space it is only to smooth her slip back down over her hips and to pull her own _kefta_ closed around her.

“You should go back to the party, Alina,” he says, eyes on where his hands linger over the knot he’s tied at her waist. She doesn’t need the connection to feel how thin his resolve is, she can hear it in his voice and despite herself she feels this intertwine with the triumph of the demonstration. She feels sated and steady, and knowing that he must feel the opposite sparks the part in the hollow of her chest that yearns for the amplifier, that power-hungry maw.

She nods, and he leaves her there.

 

 

Only later will she retrace every step, reread every expression, rethink every word from the fold to the performance. Only later will she see the machinery behind the his every action. How easily he’d played a girl who’d never been needed the way she wanted to be needed, respected, treated well.

But when she thinks on this night again, she won’t be able to convince herself that what she’d felt over their connection was just a lie. And he’ll prove that it wasn’t, despite himself.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Both of them wanting, _despite_.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> percybysshes @ tumblr and Twitter 
> 
> plz comment or come yell at me elsewhere I am pretty easy to find


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